A writer, soldier, politician, and public servant, John Buchan was born on 26 August 1875 in Perth, Scotland. His father was a lively character who enjoyed singing border ballads and other Scots songs. His more reserved mother epitomized Free Church virtues. These contrasting attitudes to life made Buchan acutely aware of the importance of maintaining respectability, while appreciating that it's the world's eccentrics who get things done. At Oxford, he proved a brilliant student, while concurrently launching a lifetime literary career during which he would publish over 100 books. After graduating from Brasenose College in 1899, he launched a highly successful practices in both law and journalism, notably serving as a political private secretary to Lord Milner, the High Commissioner for South Africa, during and after the Boer War.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Buchan was suffering from duodenal ulcers and considered medically unfit for active service. He spent three months confined to bed and began to write a serialized history of the conflict, which was published by Thomas Nelson in 24 volumes. With each instalment around 50,000 words long, the work was marketed as "a readable narrative" and "an authoritative record for the future".
Writing at the beginning of the First World War, Buchan found a side project that proved a welcome distraction from the realities of world events. Later he remembered, "While pinned to my bed during the first months of war and compelled to keep my mind off too tragic realities, I gave myself to stories of adventure." His The Thirty-Nine Steps was serialized in 'Blackwood's Magazine' in the summer of 1915, where it was credited to the pseudonym H. de V. The book version came out in October the same year under the author's own name and sold over 25,000 copies in its first three months. With a plot full of train travel, code-breaking, car crashes and political intrigue, the novel has remained in print ever since. It is considered the seminal work of the "Spy Thriller" genre.
The novel's action takes place very precisely during a few weeks in May and June 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War. And its hero, Scotsman Richard Hannay, is immediately caught up in a troublesome situation that exposes just how vulnerable Britain could be to foreign plots. Throughout the book, Buchan holds Hannay up as an example of an ordinary man who puts his country's interests before his own safety. This patriotic stance, along with the page-turning plot, made the story a hit with soldiers stuck in the trenches of the First World War.
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During 1915 he twice visited the Western Front as a war correspondent, observing and reporting on the Second Battle of Ypres and the Battle of Loos. Somehow, during this period, he found time to write his second espionage novel, Greenmantle. Set during the war in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Loos, Buchan's hero Richard Hannay is drawn into a dangerous intelligence mission to investigate rumors of a German-orchestrated Muslim uprising during World War I. Traveling through enemy territory with trusted companions, Hannay must decode cryptic clues, assume false identities, and navigate a web of spies and conspirators. Their perilous journey leads to Constantinople and beyond, where they race to uncover the mystery of "Greenmantle". Lesser remembered today than The Thirty-Nine Steps, figures like Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock, who made an outstanding film of The Thirty-Nine Steps, considered Greenmantle the superior work.
In 1916, Buchan received a field commission as a second lieutenant in the British Army's Intelligence Corps and was attached to General Headquarters (GHQ) on the Western Front, drafting official press communiqués and speeches for General Sir Douglas Haig. It wasn't long, however, before he was pulled out of uniform and appointed Director of Information, with direct responsibility to the Prime Minister for Britain's propaganda effort. After the war, John Buchan became a Member of Parliament and a peer and, in 1935, was sworn in as Governor General of Canada. His service was highly admired before his 1940 death in Montreal. His literary output continued at a high level throughout the remainder of his life.
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While his combination of military and public service during the Great War was remarkable in itself, his parallel literary output borders on the superhuman.
- 24 volumes of: Nelson’s History of the War
- 3 novels: The Thirty Nine Steps, Greenmantle and Mr. Steadfast
- ?: Eyewitness reports from the Western Front; communiques; anonymous articles (a long-time practice)
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